Revisiting Design Thinking

A while ago, I posted a blog post about Design Thinking. To jog your memory, this was a blog post about a mini-conference that I went to and learned about a process by which people think creatively. I wanted to revisit this idea in order to tell you about something I tried in an undergraduate English composition course.

A professor wrote to me last week on Monday and asked if I could teach for him that coming Thursday. I had already had the students in the class for a 1.5 hour session a few weeks back, so I thought at first that the instructor wanted to just use the room for "research time." In fact, the professor wanted a second session for the entire 1.5 hours. Let me just say, this is pretty much unprecedented in my experience teaching in the library at ECU. I started to prep and noticed that I did not really have enough to fill the time with. I got to thinking and suddenly I thought about that Design Thinking exercise and wondered if it was something that I could modify for the class. The session was supposed to take 45 minutes.

Now let me tell you. I love active learning. But a 45-minute active learning exercise is not part of my normal repertoire. I would say that you need a little more buy-in from the instructor than I had for this. The professor I was working with was possibly a little more old-school, and for this reason, along with the fact that we did not communicate much before the session, I felt like it could have gone a bit better.

I first started out with them talking about their assignment. The paper was a simple issue paper. What is a problem in the world? Why is it a problem? How would you solve it? Since most people did not have a topic in mind, I showed them the Issues and Controversies database. I then gave them some time to look around at the topics in that database to see if they could find something that worked for them. This took about 10-15 minutes, but I think I could have kept it shorter.

I pitched my sample topic to them, which was PTSD in soldiers coming back from Afghanistan. We talked a little bit about websites that could be used, and I showed them the topic in Issues and Controversies.Next, I modeled searching in a subject-specific database. I chose SOCIndex because it is not as Psychology-heavy as some of the other databases, and after all, this is a freshman class.

Then I had them start the design thinking exercise. I explained design thinking and told them how it would work. They had to interview each other twice, make some insights, design a search strategy, and locate sources and email them. After the first interview, I had each student in the 25 person class tell me their topic. I gave them each 4 minutes for each item on the worksheet, but I think this could have easily been cut down to 2 or 3. I also gave them time to search for some articles--but here is the flip--they were searching on their partner's topic. I had hoped to have enough time to get through this and give them time at the end to search for their own topic, but we ran out of time.

Image from PowerPoint, below

If I did this again, I would make sure that the professor was on board first and that he or she understood what I was trying to do. I would also probably cut the second interview and just have them talk about whether the topic they had told their partner about seemed too broad or too narrow. I would only have given them 2-3 minutes for each item instead of 4.

For your use, here is the blank worksheet, a completed worksheet to use as an example, and a PowerPoint that you can use to teach this, if you wish to use this and try it in a class. I still feel like this was a successful attempt at doing a large-scale active learning exercise.

ADDIE Week 5: Evaluation

This is the last post in a series. If you did not read the other posts in the series, start here.

The E in ADDIE stands for Evaluation, which I will also use interchangeably with assessment in this post.

I have an admission to make. I may be the ideas queen, but I am not yet the assessment queen. The fact of the matter is, traditional methods of assessment is tough in the library setting. In a one-shot class, they are not your students. The librarian does not give out grades; in fact, we only see them for 50 minutes once, maybe twice. If you embed a three-minute library tutorial at the point of need, why would a student take the time to give feedback unless they had very strong feelings about it? That being said, there are many steps in the ADDIE process where you can do assessment of yourself. Perhaps the best place to start is to describe a couple of kinds of assessment.

Formative assessment allows students and their instructors to check in and monitor their understanding. An example of a formative assessment would be a research proposal, a PollEverywhere survey, or a quick verbal check of understanding of main points during a class. This allows the instructor to come back and reteach the topic another way, if necessary.

Courtesy of Hey Girl blog

Summative assessment allows an instructor to see how much a student learned. The most common example of a summative assessment is a midterm or final exam.

Formative assessment is the type of assessment that I feel best fits library instruction. As I mentioned before, we are not the ones giving the grades (thankfully!). Quick spot checks are the best way to figure out if students are learning what they need to know. Some examples of old-school library formative assessment is the 3-2-1 Assessment, the minute paper, or the muddiest point exercise.

The issue here is that formative assessment is hugely important--but it does not unequivocally show student success, the kind of thing where you can equate how well someone learned something. This has become what I call "the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg" for the library. If the library could find a way to prove their impact on each student, this would mean we could fight things like budget cuts and get new positions more readily. Formative assessment is also not the type of thing that you want to use to assess whether someone is a good teacher or not. My feeling is that it is mainly an ethereal kind of assessment--temporary and made to incite change in the student or instructor.

Another form that assessment takes is self-assessment during the ADDIE process. Some examples of this are to check back to make sure that the lesson or tutorial that you are designing teaches the learning objectives you hope the students will master. You may wish to do a usability test to try out the website, tutorial, or instruction on a learner or two and see if they understand the learning objectives after having gone through the instructional intervention.

I am excited to learn more about assessment and I have made this an area of growth for myself personally and for our department. To do my part, I am going to the ARL Assessment Conference in October. The past proceedings are published up until 2014 and these are a treasure trove of ideas that I have yet to dive into. I also worked to reorganize our department to make room for a Coordinator of Instructional Assessment, who just started in March. Through these methods, I hope to become an assessment guru!

This was the last blog post in the ADDIE series. If you have questions or comments, or wish to know more about a specific part of the process, please let me know!